A Meditation on Revolution

The first time I remember being in a very large crowd and feeling that I really belonged was in 1982.

Several months before, Israel had invaded Lebanon. I had heard
rumors of a massacre at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and
Shatila in Beirut as I walked to work in Israel. My Israeli coworker's
attitude, as he told me, was troubling. He was not bothered that Israel
might have done something wrong—only that Israel would get blamed.

The next Saturday, my Israeli wife and I made the hour-long trip from
Haifa to Tel Aviv for a protest. We got early seats at an outside table
at one of the European-style pastry shops that surround this big
square, where Yitzhak Rabin was later assassinated. It was like a huge family gathering.
People poured in from all over the country; there were hugs and kisses
and greetings of friends who hadn't seen each other in years.

Our addiction to violence has so accustomed us to public statements
justifying our wars that we often don't even notice that we no longer
believe them.

A reported 400,000 Israelis showed up for this protest, representing
about 10 percent of the entire Jewish population of Israel at the time.
Imagine how we would feel if 10 percent of Americans—more than 30 million—came out
to protest the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

After the rally we walked by one Israeli man who stood atop a
flat-bed truck taunting the crowd, jeering, “Begin, Begin, (Menahim
Begin), King of Israel!” I felt so much at ease that I didn't hesitate
to turn to the crowd and say, “Just ignore him!”

It was there that I first experienced the power that Gandhi called
truth force—a liberating exuberance that I would recognize again this
year as hundreds of thousands of Egyptians in Tahrir Square demanded
that their voices be heard. As Adrienne Maree Brown wrote in YES! Magazine of her own reaction, "My heart is bursting from my chest today, tears on my cheeks, my skin covered in waves and waves of goosebumps as my body integrates the beautiful revolution in Egypt." I felt just the same way.

But 21 years after my first truth force awakening in Tel Aviv, I watched Baghdad's Firdos Square during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the contrast could not have been greater.

Firdos Square is a large traffic circle with multiple lanes of cars
racing around a center that used to host a huge statue of Saddam Hussein. The U.S. military pulled down that statue and the scene was
shown over and over on American television. Even though there were only a
few hundred people there, the media played up the event of the toppled
statue as if all of Iraq embraced the U.S. as liberators.

I knew better. I'd seen the great suffering of the Iraqi people firsthand during the preceding years of sanctions.

On my nine trips to Iraq, bringing medicines to ailing hospitals, I would stay at one of two hotels only a block away from Firdos Square. It was well known to me.

During these trips, I used to bring delegation members to these hospitals
to show what conditions were like. We regularly saw water-borne diseases, a
lack of medicine, and limited electricity. In one hospital the doctor
showing us around got on the elevator with a flashlight. There was a
shortage of light bulbs because of sanctions and the elevator was
completely dark.

I knew this was due to the U.S. bombing of virtually all of Iraq's
electric plants during the 1991 Gulf War—followed by 12 devastating
years of economic sanctions.

The tragedy of these sanctions is embodied, for me, in the memory of a very sweet young girl—she must have been
around 8 years old—sitting on a hospital bed with her mother beside her.
Because Iraq was prevented from selling oil, there was no money to pay
nurses. This young girl had childhood leukemia, a form of cancer which
has a very high cure rate in the U.S. with proper medication. In Iraq
the cure rate was about zero. There were few cancer medicines
available. I asked the doctor what this very poor family would have
done before sanctions. He told me the medicines would have been free
for them. “Free as water,” he said.

If you want to understand what regime change by force versus
regime change by an uprising of hundreds of thousands of nonviolent people looks
like, this is it. In essence, it's violence versus nonviolence. We
don't yet know what the final outcome in Egypt will be, but we can see the results in
Iraq after twenty years of U.S.-led efforts: immense suffering and many
hundreds of thousands of deaths from sanctions and invasion.

Gandhi once said that there is a coin with “nonviolence” written on one
side and “truth” on the other. I think we have become accustomed to a
different coin, with “violence” on one side and “untruth” on the other.
Our addiction to violence has so accustomed us to public statements
justifying our wars that we often don't even notice that we no longer
believe them.

Violence shows a lack of imagination. It's time to get serious about imaginative nonviolence.

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Bert Sacks wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Bert is scheduled to appear in Federal Court on September 19, 2011, for refusing to pay a fine incurred when he broke U.S. sanctions in Iraq to bring medicine to children. Find out more at iraqikids.org